Forging a Social Science:
The Contribution of Veblen, Coase and Keynes to the Role of Institutions in Economics
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33834/bkr.v12i1.405Keywords:
institutions, economic science, Thorstein Veblen, John Maynard Keynes, Ronald CoaseAbstract
This article aims to analyze the contribution of three authors who gave rise to the emergence of original schools of thought in Economics and dealt with the role of institutions in the economy. The authors chosen to the debate suggested in this paper have in common the interest in the role of institutions in the economy. Two of these authors are directly associated to Institutional Economics: Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) and Ronald Coase (1910-2013). Although from distinct institutionalist schools of thought, they had the intention to bring the institutional dimension of life to the economic analysis. Outside the specialized institutionalist debate, John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) gave the first steps to inaugurate a new branch in Economics, giving birth to Macroeconomics and engendering the emergence of many schools of thought in this new field of research. In Keynes’ work we may find issues concerning institutions, mainly when he considers conventions as a relevant concept to understand macroeconomic results. In this paper we intend not only to observe the contributions of Veblen, Coase and Keynes to Economics, but also to draw some similarities, and important distinctions, between these authors.
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